Jessica Schmidt, MD, MPH
Division Chief
Fellowship Director
Dr. Jessica Schmidt is an associate professor of emergency medicine. She serves as Director of Global Health at the University of Wisconsin Department of Emergency Medicine and is a faculty in the Division of Emergency Ultrasound. Dr. Schmidt also leads a Global Health Pre-departure Course for all graduate medical education trainees at UW Health.
She is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine; while in Baltimore, she completed a Masters in Public Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she focused on epidemiology and biostatistics. Dr. Schmidt completed her emergency medicine residency training at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. She then chose to focus on ultrasound and global health by completing an ultrasound fellowship at Denver Health Medical Center.
Dr. Schmidt is currently partnering with physicians at Mbale Regional Referral Hospital and the Mbale Clinical Research Institute, along with Atlas International, an NGO dedicated to improving health for children in Eastern Africa. The project is focused on creating a training and research program in point-of-care ultrasound in Mbale. Most recently, Dr. Schmidt helped to develop and implement a web-based toolkit to provide education and resources to learners utilizing point-of-care ultrasound in low-resource settings (Global Point of Care Ultrasound: A Technical Guide). She also currently serves as C0-chair for Section of Emergency Ultrasound Global Subcommittee with the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and Membership Chair for Global Community of Practice at the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM).
Dr. Schmidt’s academic interests include emergency ultrasound, international medicine and resident education. She has studied, taught or worked in Belgium, Ethiopia, France, Guatemala, Mali, Nepal, Peru, Rwanda, Senegal, Thailand, and Uganda.
Janis Tupesis, MD
Dr. Tupesis is a clinical professor of emergency medicine and serves as Associate Director of the UW Global Health Institute. He is involved in multiple ongoing projects at the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank in Africa. He serves on several international global health education committees, including on the Board of Directors for the International Federation for Emergency Medicine (IFEM), and with the African Federation for Emergency Medicine (AFEM), American College of Emergency Medicine (ACEP) and the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Global Emergency Medicine Academy (GEMA). In 2018, he was awarded the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award by GEMA for his work on emergency care health and education systems development.
Dr. Tupesis also previously served as the Faculty Co-Advisor for UW–Madison’s engagement with the UN Development Programme, Engineers Without Borders, and other partners focusing on facilitating capacity building and systems strengthening work around COVID-19 response in low and middle-income countries.